Larry King Lives!

Continued (page 2 of 10)

So, sitting in Utah, what are you thinking isn't there?

"Jews. Blacks. A sense of texture. They all look the same.…" He says this sitting on a sofa in his Beverly Hills mansion. "I'd rather be here or New York." Each day in Provo, the local Albertsons grocery store receives what King believes are the town's only four copies of The New York Times. He has an arrangement, which involves the promise of an extra King dollar bill, that one of these copies be reserved for him. Even so, he's nervous enough about losing his lifeline to the outside world that he's there every morning at seven anyway, to make sure. He needs it. "I mean, they're nice people, they're very nice to me, and I respect the family, and they do a lot of good for other people. I'm not a churchgoer. I used to go sometimes with my wife—I don't go anymore." King has yet to become one of those who belatedly embrace faith before the final tally is taken. "In fact," he says, "the more I interviewed religious leaders, the less religious I became. Because they don't have the answers I need. I don't get the answer to why. Why is there a Holocaust? And the answer I get is: We do not question the ways of the Lord. A lot of it—I tend to agree with Bill Maher—is superstitious. It's a nice thing to have. There are times I wish I had it. Like, I wish I were going somewhere when I die. Billy Graham used to tell me, 'You're very spiritual, and you are going somewhere—don't question that.' So I hope he's right."

And what if Graham is right, but wherever it is you end up going is just like Provo?

"It'd still be better than being dead," King answers, but then he pauses, as though this is one reply he has carelessly blurted out loud without giving it the full consideration it requires. He now rocks his hand in equivocation, reweighing the delicately balanced alternatives before him: eternal nothingness…Provo…eternal nothingness…Provo…eternal nothingness…Provo…eternal nothingness…Provo.

Tough call. Eventually, he concludes that his first answer was probably the correct one—"I'd rather be in Provo"—though he leaves the impression that Utah may only have prevailed by the slenderest of margins. And that a recount is never out of the question.

Anyway, King's making other plans. He would like to be frozen: "I figure if I'm frozen there's this little bit of a chance that whatever I'd died of they'd cure." He has yet to make the arrangements (there's something charming and admirably defiant about the way King, a man who nearly died twenty-two years ago, talks about such matters as though they are, for now, mere theoretical concerns and that the necessary practicalities can best be dealt with later in life), but he has asked his lawyer to look into it. He knows there's a place near Phoenix. He did some interviews about it years ago.

His wife, who is a country singer, hates this idea. As a Mormon, she devoutly believes he will come back, and he knows that as an unbeliever he will be retroactively baptized by her church in death. "Strange to me," he says. "I'll die, and at my funeral they'll baptize me. And I'm Jewish." He and his wife used to argue about such things, but he says he has now learned to stay away from it. "You can't argue religion," he says. "It's impossible. And I know I'm a good interviewer, so I could take anyone in that family. I could take the pope. Put him in a corner and he has no answer. He has no answer. But he has something I don't have—belief."

I mention to King something I half remember reading—that if one chooses to be frozen, there are two different cryogenic price plans: one where they just freeze the head, one for the whole body.

"What would you do with just the head?" he wonders. "Put it on someone else?" Still, he muses on what I've said and seems to come to a decision, albeit an odd and brilliantly nonsensical one.

"I'll do both!" he declares. "Give me both! Let's play it safe!"

*****

Larry King's day begins at 6:30 a.m. He sees that his two young boys—Chance, 10, and Cannon, 9—get dressed, and then he drives them to school. After that he has breakfast at the Beverly Hills deli Nate 'n Al with his friends Herbie, Irwin, Asher, Sid, and others. (It's a men-only gathering, though occasional exception has been made for Barbara Walters, Madeleine Albright, and King's 49-year-old wife, Shawn). Back home he checks the news, checks in with CNN, reads the five or six newspapers he requires each day, has lunch, talks to friends, picks the boys up from school at three, brings them home, then maybe plays a bit of catch with them. His CNN driver comes at four. At the studio, he'll go over the show, then go into makeup at five thirty and be live on-air at six, ready to start asking.